Rather than working with AI as I have done previously, creating abstract shapes and sometimes interweaving those with a variety of mark-making artefacts, both digital and analogue, I have recently been creating straightforward images using Midjourney for a commercial job. It’s been frustrating and difficult for me although I like working with my partner very much. It has also forced me to overcome boundaries around taste and has really challenged my feminist ethics. In these straitened times everything becomes a luxury, including personal morality – no matter how sanctimonious some might deem mine. I tell myself, a single parent’s gotta house and feed her offspring, after all.
Despite the discomfort, this process has been invaluable in terms of research, not to mention the earnings. I have seen things I would not have seen and recognised patterns and tropes I would not have recognised, had I not spent my time and energy on this task.
Firstly, as I must make images of women, I have come to the conclusion that these image-machines surely must have been trained on a store of dead or sleeping plastic models. Perhaps there is a vast store of Sleeping Beauty Cindy Doll images somewhere on the internet. Is porn really dominated by sexual fantasies about sleeping plastic ladies? It’s very odd. An extremely high percentage of the women generated seem narcoleptic. Or indeed dead! Or could this be an indicator that, as Luciana Parisi (2004) writes in Abstract Sex, “…the patriarchal dream of independence from nature and from the female body is also completely reached” – or even surpassed!
By now, anyone who has read anything about AI images probably knows that the machine finds hands difficult. But did you know, wine glasses are too? It’s super hard to generate aesthetically pleasing ones.
Weirdly, in my experience – so it may be different for others – the fourth image in a grid of initial generations tends to be the most risqué*. By risqué, I mean they show a bit of flesh. We’re not to see flesh because the machine forbids it mostly, although one can spend a lot of time trying to hack the system, and you can get ‘lucky’ if flesh is what you’re after. But my generations are usually as buttoned up as you can get … positively Victorian! I have started to wonder if the machine senses my disapproval and impatience towards the Western canon and its obsession with women’s naked bodies? Of course, it doesn’t, but it’s odd that my working partner seems to generate fewer buttoned up ladies. Do I emanate prudishness through my computer and phone keys?
Another thing I have come face to face with is the reality that there are men, and presumably women too, who enjoy uploading images to sites that use an algorithm to ‘undress’ the subject. These sites are more ridiculous than I can begin to say. What the fuck is wrong with people?? Good grief, we are a repressed society. I’ve not begun venturing into the dark web yet, but feel that if I am to do this research justice, perhaps I need to. Or maybe it’s sufficient to be aware of the eleven-year-old looking girls rendered to look seductive on Instagram?
Besides the deeply troubling ethics, most of the images ‘out there’ are as far from the sort of thing I am keen on visually as they could be. And I refer you to a comment made by art academic James Elkins (2011), mentioned in a former blog (2022) about the tediousness of a good deal of photography – and how he stated that “Flickr is the monstrous, unimaginable progeny of the tiny samples of “shock” that Barthes knew.” It seems that AI images are that in spades. If we replace the word photography with AI images in Elkins’ What Photography Is, we might reach the same conclusion – the majority of AI images aren’t that interesting, although the process remains so. Even the AI images being published in magazines or produced by well-known names are kinda … well, not stuff I’d want to spend time with (if not eeeeeuuuugh.) Again, pardon me for saying so. However, every now and again you stumble across some terrific work made with smart intentions. For me, these often include humour and an understanding that the best strategy to work with the machine seems to entail exploiting what it can do, and also, most importantly, its many and inherent flaws. And the realisation that this is a way of tapping into and drawing out society’s neuroses and unconscious horrors in image-form. One of my favourites is an artist called Ossa Gross. They are funny and clever, although, of course, not everyone will agree. (Isn’t that the point of subjectivity?)
More successful, in my mind, AI-generations may have been produced with a single prompt. However, the images I am generating and which please me most often emerge after several iterations, and by pushing something that shows promise: expanding, re-prompting with alternative words, in-painting.
But just like with photography, it’s the surprises, the collective unconscious slips that emerge which tend to be the most rewarding. Even when it’s an accidental bit of disallowed nakedness!
Right, that’s it – research continues. I’m off to finish reading some essays on Kitsch.
*complete nonsense, of course it’s totally random but sometimes the machine seems to get in a recognisable rut
Refs:
Elkins, J. (2011) What photography is. New York: Routledge.
Field, SJ (2022) The end of something … but I’m not sure it’s art just yet. At: https://sjffieldscribbles.uk/2022/10/03/the-end-of-something-but-im-not-sure-its-art-just-yet/ (Accessed 13/09/2023).
Parisi, L. (2004) Abstract sex: philosophy, bio-technology and the mutations of desire. London ; New York: Continuum.